A Rasmussen poll out today reveals that almost 60% of likely Wisconsin voters now disapprove of their aggressive governor’s performance, with 48% strongly disapproving.

While these numbers are clearly indicators of a strategy gone horribly wrong, there are some additional findings in the poll that I suspect deserve even greater attention.

It turns out that the state’s public school teachers are very popular with their fellow Badgers. With 77% of those polled holding a high opinion of their educators, it is not particularly surprising that only 32% among households with children in the public school system approve of the governor’s performance. Sixty-seven percent (67%) disapprove, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

Can anyone imagine a politician succeeding with numbers like this among people who have kids?

These numbers should be of great concern not only to Governor Walker but to governors everywhere who were planning to follow down the path of war with state employee unions. You can’t take on the state worker unions without taking on the teachers – and the teachers are more popular than Gov. Walker and his cohorts appear to realize.

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Right you are, Pangolin. The freedom NOT to believe is just as important as the freedom to believe…or to believe differently than the majority. One of the things I can’t get a lot of churchmen to understand is that Separation of Church and State doesn’t just protect state from church…but the reverse as well!

JIm_I tend to agree with most, not all, of Christ’s teachings. Christianity I find to be a lot more like a bowl of picked-over jellybeans. There’s a few flavors I like and a lot of black licorice and watermelon that I can’t stand. If you like black licorice and watermelon that’s fine too as long as you don’t insist I eat them also.

Freedom to choose your flavor of religion has more to do with the founding of the U.S. than almost any other issue. It’s one I hold tight to my heart.

If I may plug somebody else on the teaching topic I would beg you take a gander at Doug Stowes blog. Doug teaches woodshop and tells us why it’s important.

At some point we are going to have to face reality and admit that MOST of our kids are NOT going to spend their lives working on stuff that requires advanced professional degrees. College tracking kids whose chances of real success are slim and none is slow cruelty.

On top of that I would assert that those slated for the professions should be viscerally aware of the actual work that goes into making, buildings, food, transportation, clothing and power appear for them. This b.s. where we treat tradesmen and laborers as if they are interchangeable and disposable as lego blocks has to stop.

Speaking as a believer in Jesus and a follower…albeit a poor one, I can tell you that your outlook is actually more Biblical and more truly “Christian” than what the Christo-Fascists pass off as traditional values these days.

And you’re right on.

You know what I find particularly amusing? The very people who are most exercised about the “evils” of scientific Darwinism are almost always the most ardent apostles of social Darwinism. If they would revisit their history, they’d discover that one of the champions of the traditional creation story — William Jennings Bryan — was primarily of that mind because he feared the implications of the “survival of the fittest” concept for those he (and Jesus Christ, presumably) would deem “the least of these”.

I’d still disagree with Caribou Barbie on science, but I could swallow her pill a hell of a lot easier if she’d disabuse herself of the idea that the wealthy, the elite and the strong are God’s favored people. (And all the rest can root, hog or die.)

Today, for the most part, those of us who embrace scientific Darwinism — whether we believe in God or not — tend to be the most ferocious defenders ot the supposedly least fit.

Ex-wife of mine is a public school teacher and it’s not a fate I would wish on anyone who doesn’t freely choose it. Teacher’s should be represented by unions and unions in turn should be fairly, and transparently elected and governed.

The idiocy of conservative groupthink is they’re willing to spend $50K a year keeping one criminal in prison but think they’re being ripped off to give a $75k salary and benefits package to one teacher babysitting 30 of their offspring.

The point of disposing of unions is first a matter of general politics and secondly a point of curriculum control. It’s so much easier to teach creationism and climate change denial if you can simply fire anybody who insists on teaching science in a science classroom.

Anybody who thinks “good Christian values” and home-skoolin is a substitue for a liberal and scientifically accurate education just needs to take a gander at Bristol Palin. There’s a girl who failed to grasp eighth grade biology where surely she never missed sunday school.

As Rasmussen polls normally tend to have results that give Republicans a slightly higher status than other mainstream polling organizations (or actual election results) do, it wouldn’t be surprising if the public opposition is slightly higher even than this poll shows.

To Robert: The “will of the people” (to the extent that concept makes any sense) is entirely applicable when we’re talking about constitutionally allowable public policies. But when we’re talking about legal determinations of what is constitutionally allowable, such as the Prop 8 case, the will of the people doesn’t matter, because the will of the people must succumb to the Constitution (unless their will is strong enough to amend it). Even if Judge Walker was wrong on the law, the will of the people would still be irrelevant to the proper determination of that case.

In the Wisconsin case, the will of the people is irrelevant to the constitutionality of the law limiting collective bargaining rights, regardless of whether the law is constitutional or not. On the other hand, if it is constitutional, the will of the people does matter in relation to the issue of whether the state government should or should not make it the policy.

Unions are not “the people”. Well, what are they then? They are groups of “the people”. As, as I have enumerated countless times before based on the writings of our founders, this nation was founded as a collective and as a society…not as a disconnected, disassociated gathering of lone rangers. Unions are certainly not the ONLY definition of “the people”. If that’s what you’re saying, then we agree. But say it, man.

The total ownership of the media by the left. Really? Do you REALLY want to have this discussion again?

I was a member of the Radio and TV News Directors Association for many years. What our reports and surveys indicated was that there was a healthy mix of mainstream conservative and mainstream liberal people working in broadcast news shops of all sorts. What we did not have were extremist liberal or extremist conservative voices. (Outside Christian radio, where extremist conservative voices were quite common.)

What we could also see quite clearly was that ownership of news organizations was almost wholly conservative. Even supposedly liberal MSNBC is owned by corporate America. With the exception of four hours a night, five nights a week, MSNBC is pretty center-right.

Oh and Robert, I’ll be expecting you to complain that “Amazing how everyone uses polls and “the will of the people” when it supports their cause.” the next time the Republicans claim some mandate from the people when they propose something that is popular.

Yeah I know…it’s probably silly of me to expect actual morality and honesty out of you but what can I say…I’m an optimist.

An often disappointed optimist but an optimist none the less.

As for Wisconsin you really should be slamming Walker. He and his fellow Republicans did the one thing that your party shouldn’t have done if it wants to win next year.

It pissed us liberals off and gave us one of the absolute perfect fights that we routinely kick your sides ass on. Welcome to the next year of the Democrats painting the Republicans as anti-worker and anti-middle class at every opportunity.

Robert, where exactly in the US Constitution does it say that some group’s equality is up to the vote of some perceived majority? Because, hey, if it is then I’m sure you won’t mind if I and my fellow Catholics, as the majority in this country, strip every non-Catholic Christian of their right to marry right?

And as for the right’s supposed argument against that judge…they don’t quite realize that their argument also says that no heterosexual judge can rule against gay marriage because of some supposed bias.

As for the unions…specifically the ones in Wisconsin, they said they agreed to cuts to help with Wisconsin’s budget problem, Robert.

Of course Wisconsin wouldn’t have had a budget problem in the first place if the first thing Walker did when he got in office wasn’t give out stupid tax cuts to the rich and businesses in Wisconsin. But somehow that fact gets conveniently ignored by your side of the political spectrum.

As for your statement of “unions cannot continue to control the public sector” how about you get your side to quit treating the unions and the public sector as scapegoats and punching bags first. Then how about you start worrying about the fact that companies in this country have way more power then the unions ever did. Contrary to what you delusionally want to believe…unions aren’t the problem.

Or is that too much honesty and objectivity to expect out of you, Robert?

As for you, Hattip, if the media was dominated by liberals like you want to claim the Republicans wouldn’t be able to win elections at all. It’s time you go find your brain little boy.

Hattip, you’re so full of bull—- you probably make your own heat in the winter.

Given the almost total ownership of the media by the Left, and how beholden the Left is to (mostly government) unions, this conflation is particularly pernicious and toxic to democracy and liberty.

If there are a dozen news outlets in the entire nation that are owned by liberals, it would be a miracle. News media are almost totally owned by the right. You’ve never heard of Rupert Murdoch? You’ve never studied the biographies of Hearst and Pulitzer? You didn’t know NBC was owned by GE for years until it was recently sold to an even more right-wing owner?

The Unions are not “the people”, nor are they the electorate. “Teachers”, acting in their own private interest through a Union, should not in this context be described as “Teachers” but “Union members:. In fact, given how terrible the collective performance of these so-called “teacher” is, they should not be called “teachers” at all. Let us get facts straight.

Through your willful corruption of language you hope to corrupt debate and thereby obscure the truth.

Likewise, it is absurd to use this poll to assert that Walker is thwarting “the will of the people”./ This confound legitimate political processes with extra-political ones.

Given the almost total ownership of the media by the Left, and how beholden the Left is to (mostly government) unions, this conflation is particularly pernicious and toxic to democracy and liberty.

It s in fact the government unions that thwart the “will of the people’ if only by their feeling that the are entitled to pick their pockets, The Democrat party shares the blame.

Government worker unions are a profound wrong and lead to the sort of morality we lately see in Wisc., the Democrat Party and hereabouts.

Read the article, Robert — a judge blowing the whistle on illegal actions is not the same thing as those who perpetrated those illegal actions violating the law in the first place.

So, in addition to trampling the law, Ahab Walker is trampling the people’s wishes. It’s too bad the Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t do something to put a stop to it.

What about those judges, Robert? Four judges sided with Ahab at the Supreme Court, even though he violated the law, and now as we see, against the wishes of Wisconsin voters.

This is real voters being trampled on real hard — and you defend it. Astonishing.

Education can’t be exempt from fair budget cuts in a time of need. There is no such time of need in Wisconsin. They gave away $200 million in new, historically lowered taxes for hard, polluting industries and the very, very rich — then took $200 million from the schools to pay for it.

It’s not only unjust and foolish, it’s immorality of the sort that should incur fire and brimstone, if there is a just and angry God.

Amazing how everyone uses poles and “the will of the people” when it supports their cause. What about U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker and Proposition 8? That is real voters being trampled on and and not “likely voters”. I know we fight for what is closest to us, but education cannot be exempt from cuts in the budget, and unions cannot continue to control the public sector.

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